“There were days I hated for the phone to ring, dreaded coming home from work because I knew full well that as my son grew older, one day the news could come at any time that he had killed himself or others. It was just a matter of time until he graduated from knives to guns.”

Newtown residents hold candles at a memorial for victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

In light of the Sandy Hook tragedy, some parents like Harper are arguing that discussions about gun control are meaningless unless the focus is also on mental illness. “And that is a condition nobody wants to own and policymakers are running from like people used to run from leprosy,” says Dr. Jan Hutchinson, a board certified child psychiatrist and pediatrician.

Indeed, it should be clear that unless we take mental health treatment and interventions for our youth seriously, taking all 300 million plus guns in the America would not be enough to protect our children — both the victims and the victimizers.

Harper adopted her son Michael at age 5 and found he was acting out violently from the very beginning. “He would bang his head on the floor, grab his own neck and try to choke himself. He would go on for hours raging, screaming and cursing me. He would swing from saying ‘I am going to stab you’ to hollering ‘I want to die.’ ”

As a regular minister-visitor in the Harper home, I often prayed with Michael, who confided in me that he was hearing voices telling him “to do bad things.”

Harper said: “Before I adopted him, he had been kicked out of three other foster homes. At one home, they had to hide all their knives.”

She soon found out that shortly before his adoption he had been admitted to a mental institution in Baltimore, where he had been prescribed a retinue of drugs, including Dexedrine, an amphetamine that is often used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children. Because of Michael’s acting out in school, officials demanded that he take the drug or be put out. In addition he was not mainstreamed with other children, but sent to an alternative school where Harper said he was mixed with much older kids with behavioral problems. “Being isolated from the mainstream, it became difficult for him to internalize normal student behavior.”

Virtually by accident, Harper stumbled on a different path for her son. “Money was missing from our home. I called school officials to check Michael’s backpack and they found a knife. My son told me later that he has been carrying the knife around for a week, and I also learned he had told others he planned to kill his father and me.

“This was the last straw. I thought what if Michael had found a gun. Through the Internet, I found an all-boys boarding school in Missouri. It used different interventions, such as military organization skills, constant therapy with psychiatrists and staff, and spiritual guidance. The school guarantees success without drugs. And amazingly Michael, now 14, has not taken drugs for six months, and he is no longer hearing voices, no longer acting belligerently. He is focused, goal-oriented and a happy kid.”

For the first time, Harper has high expectations for her son, but she is angry over doctors prescribing Dexedrine for such a prolonged time at such an early age without looking at his biological or environmental conditions, which could have led to different interventions. “We took Michael to church, banned his watching violent video games and movies, but we have been living on edge, waiting for the worse. Now we are waiting for the best.”

Hutchinson said while there is not enough hard evidence to correctly assess the issues surrounding Adam Lanza, if you look at most of the previous mass shootings involving youth — from the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., to Columbine and Virginia Tech — the evidence is clear that mental illness was a factor. “There are many mental problems that are not diagnosed properly or treated, which may be associated with dangerous violent behavior.”

Hutchinson cautions: “Too many people would rather deal with their children having cancer, heart disease or any kind of life threatening physical malady than having a psychiatric medical diagnosis. It is also difficult to find the proper resources for treatment. We are also stumbling because of the stigma associated with mental problems. We cannot ignore, however, that with proper diagnosis and treatment, most people with these illnesses are stable and productive citizens in our community.”

It should be noted that on Friday, the same day of the Sandy Hook slayings, a knife-wielding man injured 22 children and one adult outside a primary school in central China as students were arriving for classes, police said. This is only the latest in a series of periodic rampage attacks at Chinese schools and kindergartens, according to the Associated Press. Authorities may have a “knife problem,” but they are planning to severely overhaul their mental health system, since most of the attackers of children had been mentally disturbed men. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned there.

Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.

To pause and restart automatic updates, click "Live" or "Paused". If paused, you'll be notified of the number of additional comments that have come in.

Comments our editors find particularly useful or relevant are displayed in Top Comments, as are comments by users with these badges: . Replies to those posts appear here, as well as posts by staff writers.